Trump supporters rally in downtown Vancouver

Joel Mattila found his people on Sunday afternoon at a rally for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump in Esther Short Park in Vancouver.

“I’m so glad to see so many Trump supporters here today,” Mattila, a Trump superfan, yelled from the stage. “It’s like we are one great big basket of deplorables.”

The crowd roared.

More than 100 people turned out for the rally to show support for Trump.

“Usually at election time, we say we’re standing at a crossroads. My friends, this election, we’re standing at the edge of a cliff,” Mattila said. “There is so much at stake in this election. This might be our last chance to save life as we know it.”

Mattila spoke of second-amendment rights and reminded the crowd that the next president will choose a supreme court justice.

“No one person, besides maybe the founding fathers, has risked so much of their fortune as Donald Trump to run for president,” Mattila said. “And he’s doing it because he loves this great nation of ours.”

April Dunham of Vancouver was in the crowd wearing a “deplorables unite” shirt, referencing comments made by Hillary Clinton, former first lady, senator and secretary of state.

Clinton reportedly said, “to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

Dunham said she appreciates that Trump is a straightforward speaker.

“He says things we haven’t heard in a long time,” she said, adding later, “I’m tired of politics as usual.”

Overall, the rally was peaceful. A handful of counter-protesters stood in the back of the rally, holding signs that read, “stop bigotry.”

Joey Gibson, who organized the Trump rally, encouraged Trump supporters to shake the protesters’ hands, saying they had been lied to and deceived by the elite media and it’s not their fault.

“The biggest threat is an over-bloated government,” Gibson said.

State Sen. Don Benton, R-Vancouver, who serves as Trump’s state campaign chair, said the media likes to focus on personalities and not policy.

“I, like Trump, like to talk about policies,” Benton said.

Trump has created jobs, while Clinton has killed them, Benton said.

“I’ve been a private businessman most of my life,” Benton said. “I serve as a citizen legislator. Only recently did I go to work for government. I cleaned it up too quickly. They wanted to get rid of me because I save them too much money over there. In the private sector, jobs are created based on certainty. Investors and company owners invest in jobs when there is certainty in the marketplace.”

Clark County Manager Mark McCauley reorganized the Department of Environmental Services, laying off five people including Benton.

Benton said Trump would articulate a business policy that will get the economy going again.

If elected, Trump also would repeal Obamacare and ensure veterans are taken care of, Benton said.

Steve Friebel of Vancouver, who is voting for Clinton, showed up to watch the rally from a distance.

“I wanted to see people who support Trump,” he said.

He’s worried that people have lost the ability to have a civil dialogue with each other about politics.

On Trump, he said, “it’s like, how did we get to this point? … It’s like a collective loss of minds.”